Talk:Sunkoshi River

Two different rivers in Chinese
It appears the river is classified as two different rivers in Chinese, the downstream section is called "孙科西河" / "桑戈西河" (transliteration of Sunkoshi) while Chinese section is called 波曲. Even the Chinese Wikipedia article says so. --Voidvector (talk) 14:35, 18 February 2022 (UTC)


 * I reverted my own changes, as it looks like different section of the river is called different things. Poiqu River (Tibet) -> Bhotekoshi River (Nepal) -> Sunkoshi River (Nepal).
 * I want to note that "Poiqu" and "Bhotekoshi" means roughly the same thing. Poiqu is Tibetan Pinyin for "Bo chu" meaning means "Tibetan water". --Voidvector (talk) 15:54, 18 February 2022 (UTC)

This is the most confusing river and confusing terminology I ever encountered. The lead sentence is a misrepresentation of the cited source, which says "The methodology was applied to the Sun Koshi river basin, a trans-boundary river basin". If the river basin is trans-boundary, that does not mean that the river itself is trans-boundary. The map in the source indicates Sun Koshi originating within Nepal, as does the AMS map that I added to the page.

"Bhote Koshi" and "Bo Chu" obviously carry the same meaning. I first disbelieved that Tibetans would call any river as "Bo Chu", but apparently the name does occur somewhere as KNAB records it. However, the more common name for the river in Tibet is Matsang Tsangpo, which is also recorded by KNAB.

The trouble seems to have arisen because the PRC started calling the Tibean river Sun Kosi. The Chinese do not use "Matsang Tsagpo" (Maquan He) for this river, because they strangely adopted it for the upper course of Tsangpo. Whether the Tibetans also think of their river as Sun Kosi is not clear. Gyurme Dorje identifies Matsang Tsangpo with Sun Kosi. -- Kautilya3 (talk) 17:16, 27 October 2022 (UTC)